Proposal: searching via ElasticSearch

#1

Hi all,

I made this proposal over on #chef-hacking and it gathered some
agreement, so I’m bringing it over for wider discussion.

My company (ZephirWorks) is willing to sponsor ElasticSearch support
in addition or as a replacement for Solr.
I plan to integrate it in chef-server, and modify chef-expander for indexing.

The obvious requirement is to support the exact same query syntax,
which is important overall but most of all to keep all cookbooks
working.
Also, we will demonstrate feature and performance parity or better.

More notes from IRC:

[10:08pm] andreacampi: my main motivation here is that with Solr, we
need our own schema, mostly for the analyzer
[10:08pm] andreacampi: that makes it harder in a cloud setup
[10:09pm] andreacampi: e.g. I’ve been beta testing LucidWorks
cloudy.io and they don’t allow this level of configuration
[10:09pm] andreacampi: (although Chef still works)
[10:09pm] andreacampi: ES is more like couchdb in this regard, you
just configure it via rest

So the big question is, would this be considered for integration in Chef?
Would you add it as a configurable alternative to Solr, or would you
just replace it?

I definitely won’t have anything ready for the next release, but I’m
sure I’ll be done before the Community Summit.

Andrea

#2

On Oct 13, 2011, at 1:21 AM, Andrea Campi wrote:

So the big question is, would this be considered for integration in Chef?
Would you add it as a configurable alternative to Solr, or would you
just replace it?

Speaking only for myself, this sounds like a great idea as an optional alternative to Solr.

However, before I would be willing to go any further than that I would want to understand more how it would work for Hosted Chef vs. chef-server and chef-solo, and I’d also want to understand better how it would work for people who are not on Amazon.

Or am I missing something obvious?

–
Brad Knowles bknowles@ihiji.com
SAGE Level IV, Chef Level 0.0.1

#3

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 15:13, Brad Knowles bknowles@ihiji.com wrote:

On Oct 13, 2011, at 1:21 AM, Andrea Campi wrote:

So the big question is, would this be considered for integration in Chef?
Would you add it as a configurable alternative to Solr, or would you
just replace it?

Speaking only for myself, this sounds like a great idea as an optional alternative to Solr.

However, before I would be willing to go any further than that I would want to understand more how it would work for Hosted Chef vs. chef-server and chef-solo, and I’d also want to understand better how it would work for people who are not on Amazon.

“Elastic Search” was an unfortunate choice of name for the product;
it’s not an amazon thing, even though most people assume it is :slight_smile:
-t